Making Experience Matter

17 May 2014 Norway celebrated its 200-year jubilee of the country’s democratic constitution. The new exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center, BeDemocracy, invites visitors to debate the state of this 200-year-old democracy and reflect upon the role of social media in the democratic participation.

Expology has developed a fully dynamic exhibition where the input from visitors forms the content and expression of the exhibition. The overall concept is to create a living exhibition resembling a physical social media experience.

Visitors exploring the exhibition during the opening on 14 May 2014

The exhibition is based around four thematic walls with a signature color, each presents cases to elaborate on aspects of their respective theme; youth, public, global and surveillance. The cases leads to question visitors can respond to on a screen or on their mobile phone. The visitors’ responses are shown in a large circular sphere at the center of the exhibition. With the help of Kinect technology visitors can “like” expressions displayed, thereby creating a rank where the most liked expressions will form the final visual look of the exhibition in November 2014.

To broaden the democratic discussion, the exhibition has it own website and Twitter account @BeDemocracy. By this, persons from all around the world can engage in the discussion and create input to the sphere in the exhibition.

Visitor interacting with the exhibition.

BeDemocracy is a temporary exhibition on display from 14 May to 23 November 2014. The exhibition is developed in collaboration with the Nobel Peace Center and the Institute for Social Research. The exhibition is supported by Institusjonen Fritt Ord and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture.

A naturum is a centre for visitors to a place of outstanding beauty or scientific interest, often a national park or a nature reserve. The naturum architecture is considered a big part of this experience. But we would also like to pay attention to the exhibitions inside.
The naturums of Sweden has got quite a lot of attention this year, both with articles in magazines and by the newly published book “Sveriges naturum – Naturum Visitor Centres in Sweden”. The book is published by the Environmental Protection Agency and Arkitektur Förlag and highlights 13 instances of good architecture characterised by a high environmental profile and good accessibility. It's a book filled with passion, beautiful pictures and fun facts.

Creating a spectacular architecture does for sure attract interest to the site. But when the experience inside these buildings, the learning exhibitions, is made second or even third in rank we really feel that someone has missed the point. We strongly believe that the architecture and the exhibition content have to work together to create an interesting learning arena for the visitor. Just placing content into a ready-made display space is not a desirable way to work in these kinds of arenas. When possible, we argue that the architecture and the experiential learning design should go hand in hand.

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Expology have created permanent exhibitions for two naturum in the last two years. The first one located in the beautiful surroundings of Söderåsen national park. This exhibition highlights the rich nature of Söderåsen with focus on water, mountains, forests and culture. While the previous exhibition had walls covering the windows facing the beautiful view outside, we strived to create a learning exhibition working with the original architecture, steering the visitors towards the view and making the exhibition become a path to nature.

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In the newly opened naturum exhibition at the bird reserve Getterön we again started out with removing elements blocking the fantastic view. We changed interior materials and colours to better cooperate with the experience and learning design we developed for the exhibition. We also made sure to take advantage of the wonderful ceiling height.

Naturum should be a rich source of information for the visitors. The exhibition together with the knowledgeable and inspiring guides is what secures this. We want to encourage a closer cooperation between the different parties involved, and we are hoping that more attention and acknowledgement will soon be given to the learning experience within these fantastic buildings.

Never visited a naturum? At the moment there is 30 naturum around Sweden to explore!

When entering Miraikan in Tokyo, The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, we are struck by all the activity. But unlike many other science centres there is no “running around”. Everywhere we look there is an air of concentration. Visitors, children and adults, are focused, interacting with the exhibits and discussing with each other. Together with all these engaged visitors we spent an afternoon exploring and looking for inspiration.

Miraikan is an extensive Science Museum with topics ranging from simple everyday problems to the Earth's environment and space. The ambition is high. Through science and technology they want us to better understand our relationship with the planet. They want us to discover new approaches to better living.

One of the main attractions is the impressive Geo-Cosmos, a huge globe display that floats in mid air, visible from almost anywhere in the building. The idea is to show us the world as seen from space. The globe is covered with around 1 million LEDs and constantly updated with satellite data used to illustrate various images of the world; cloud movements, the sea surface temperature, atmospheric pollution and a projection of simulated future global warming. It is stunning.

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So-called Science Communicators were all around Miraikan, always ready to support us in our visit, to discuss or to provide explanations of exhibits. These are personnel specially trained to act as a bridge between the general public and the scientists and engineers.

Walking out we feel we have had too little time in the museum. There are so many levels and so much to see. With tired legs we sit down on a bench outside, looking up on the massive building glowing in the sun, already looking forward to coming back.

If anything, they have succeeded with the marketing. Everywhere in and around Stockholm you hear and see about the new attraction, ABBA – The Museum. Rental bikes, cars branded with the museum’s logo have been seen in the city for weeks before the opening. Some of the band’s costumes have even been on display at Arlanda airport to promote the new attraction. Of course we had to pay it a visit to see what the hype is all about and the first week of opening a group of expologists spent an evening in the world of Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Anni-Frid.

We do not wish to give a full review of the exhibition, but to be honest we do see a lot of improvement potential, especially when it comes to execution. Although, we are sure that in due time this will be a great place for fans and tourists to indulge in a full ABBA experience.

Let’s focus on the good stuff. The ambition. The ideas. ABBA – The Museum makes us happy because they involve us as users in creating our experience. They invite us to take part and challenge us to become the fifth member of the group, trying on costumes, recording in the Polar Studio and performing on stage with the rest of the group. By scanning the entry ticket at each interactive station we can record our experience and pick it up later at the museum’s webpage.

We who live and breathe experiential learning every day had a fun time at the museum. We strongly believe that by involving the user in creating the experience you enhance learning and the effect of communication. Taking the inspiration from our evening with ABBA and mixing it with our own experiences and beliefs, we will continue to press forward with more user involvement in all our exhibitions.

Expology recently visited Ajax Experience, one of the latest tourist attractions in Amsterdam. Ajax Experience is located in the heart of the Dutch capital, the hometown of one of the world’s most celebrated football clubs: AFC Ajax. The Ajax Experience exhibition has been addressed not only to the older visitors, who remember the club’s glory, but also to younger ones, who will be able to feel the atmosphere of the club and test their own football skills in the different parts of the exhibition.

We were interested in the digital floors where parts of the Ajax-philosophy are put on show. An English youth football club visited the centre that day, and they eagerly tested their football control and competed against each other with the results shown on screens. This gives action to the visit. To give other perspectives you can also enjoy the historical Ajax-moments on video or take a master class in tactics.

Another great experience is the speech of the coach Frank de Boer to his team encouraging them to win the European Cup Final. The coach digitally walks in to the dressing room and starts talking to the audience. Ajax Experience is an entertaining and pedagogic experience-centre within the field of sports.

Lightweight blocks move in and out of the large wall facade, creating infinite number of possibilities in the vertical 180 degree landscape. The audience also has a part in the pattern shaping performance, as thousands of cubes move in reaction to the sounds of the surrounding atmosphere. Pixel waves sweep the space, ripples emit from the centre and just in case this is not enough, projection mapping takes care of the rest. The stunning effects from this installation are made possible from a specially made steel construction that helps support thousands of stepper motors which, in turn control the 300x300mm cubes that project out of the internal facade of the building. Check out the video of the installation in action for a more visual description!